Once upon a time there was a little company with a big idea and big ideals that put itself out there for everyone to get to know and become familiar with and a lot of people liked it. Their unofficial motto at the time was, "don't be evil." They hired new management, adopted a new philosophy became unable to tell the difference between good and evil, found out they kind of liked evil and while people still use them they have about as much respect for their truth, integrity and honesty as CNN or the DNC. Nobody trusts them.
The War Department has been negotiating something foundational with Anthropic and it looked like one side was smugly wrapped in the arms of its own "don't be evil" code but the thing about appearances and reality is that reality cannot tolerate the appearance of 'suddenly defined unacceptable parameters.' If the War Department buys a product and it isn't lethal or designed to counter lethal effects or attacks or to repair awful damage than it really isn't spending the money the way the Public intended. Nobody want's a fuzzy tank or a warm wraparound friendly bomb.
It looks like Anthropic decided to go to the wall on its case against allowing some dickhead in a military uniform or any miscellaneous orange myrmidon to misuse its technology. That shows principles and integrity and so on and so forth. Good for Anthropic.
The Secretary of War has no choice now but to not only ban them from any and all Pentagon procurements, but it also must kill every single intrusion of it into the upstream supply chain where the principles so dear to the founders and owners of Anthropic are allowed to trump the needs of the military and Defense Department. That ugly baby seal needs to be clubbed into nonexistence everywhere it tries to intrude its inflexible principles because Anthropic does not understand.
I'm sure I'm wrong it in this but I'm happy to stake the ground out. It could well be that the leaders of Anthropic are men of conviction and are unwilling to be the genesis of a new weapon or system that will get out of control. They don't want to be whoever it was that made Skybolt. Good for them. On the other hand what they refuse to accept is, 'that war makes monsters of us all.' A country cannot afford to farm out its conscience and its war-fighting to corporations.
People and corporations and twits fail to understand that there are no rules in war. There are guidelines but they are not rules. Nobody can afford rules in war.
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026
Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted…
No country at war can tolerate idiots jumping in to share their attitudes on 'recklessness, hastiness, ferocity or any other imbecility that they can conceive of to shape and limit the amount of force and fire power brought to bear against the enemy and so limit the war to what they and they alone think is proper.' Oh they can yell about it and demonstrate all they like but they don't get to make the decisions. We did that when we elected the Commander-in-Chief.
This is how War is done. There is no other way. What Anthropic was demanding was a say in this. They are idiots. General Washington was absolutely right.
11 comments:
I'm quite certain the people running Anthropic are just as evil as the people running AlphaBet Inc. Their issue is Hegseth won't allow them free rein to run things their way instead of his. They have NO problem with death and violence. As long as it serves THEIR agenda. Just like all leftists.
Care to share something resembling facts to support your comment Dan?
I had to laugh how Renegades folks responded to your comments over there. As they moderate that means the management agreed with them.
This is becoming politicized, and it is too important for that.
To me, it appears to be centered around two items of conflict, and the resolution of these conflicts do not belong to Anthropic nor to the DOW.
DOW wants to be able to use the software for "any lawful use". Anthropic wants to DOW to agree to additional "safeguards" to not use their software for: (1) mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and (2) developing fully autonomous weapons.
The first item should not be an issue. Mass surveillance should be illegal (it is in direct conflict with the 4th amendment) and the DOW only wants to use Anthropic for lawful purposes.
The second is more problematical. The development and deployment of fully autonomous weapon systems puts humanity at risk. One way to address this is to classified them as "weapons of mass destruction" and work to update existing treaties on these types of weapons. But so long as we do not have any treaties in place about the use of such systems, Anthropic (a private corporation) should not be dictating the decision on whether (or not) to develop these systems.
There should be bi-partisan efforts to do the following:
1. Work with the state department with updating treaties about weapons of mass destruction to include autonomous weapons.
2. Work with industry and professional societies on developing comprehensive safeguards and ethics regarding the use of AI technologies. NIST (https://www.nist.gov/artificial-intelligence) might be a good place to coordinate this effort.
3. Comprehensive legislation prohibiting mass surveillance. Government officials have no business knowing where I am, where I have been, what my plans for the future are, etc.
Anthropic is a private company and has every right to do business with whomever they choose. If they decide not to do business with the US government for whatever reason, that's their choice regardless of they reasons why. Something about "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" also includes Uncle Sam.
This is not some left wing group demanding gay wedding cakes from a Christian bakery, it's private company who has their own ideals about how their product should be used. Whether or not you or the DOJ agree with that is not the point.
Lets be honest, the US government has a habit of weaponizing pretty much any technology they get their hands on against the interests of the American citizen regardless of their rhetoric about keeping Americans safe. Maybe not this administration, but once the genie is out of the bottle, you can be sure the next left administration will use it against their domestic enemies.
Unfortunately Anthropic is just delaying the inevitable because one of their competitors will be more than happy to provide that technology. In the age of AI, writing code to do whatever you want is getting easier all the time.
Your phone is the least of your problems when it comes to being tracked. People post their daily routines on open platform social media all the time. They post the most personal information for all the world to see including what they're doing and when they come and go.
In todays world you are tracked when you use your phone or any smart device. Every time you use your credit card, ATM card, drive your car (Automated License Plate Readers and traffic cameras), use the airport, get pulled over for a traffic violation or a routine stop or just walking pretty much anywhere by hundreds of private and company security cameras. And of course your home and property are routinely monitored by either by drive by inspectors or drones to check for any improvements and raise your property tax.
So yes, you are being monitored everyday whether you like it or not. And if a private company has concerns about how the Government will use their software, possibly against American citizens, they have every right not to do business with the DOW.
Sara Conner would like a word with you about AI as your battle buddy.
Michael @ 10:52, that's very like what I thought.
--Tennessee Budd
Someone call the plumber...the toilet is dripping again.
Ah dear Danny the man with fact less opinions is back.
When the lights go out forever what will you do without our keyboard hero?
It is a pretty little problem but it really has only the one solution as offered by DOD.
Mass surveillance and the flock cameras and the license plate readers and the ubiquitous cell phone tracking and logging of every movement and the damned near universal facial recognition is OUT THERE AND USED EVERYWHERE.
A Treaty is a piece of paper. It has no force beyond what a Superpower is willing to do to enforce it. As you know, mines and sea mines are 100% fully autonomous weapons. Nobody has gotten around to banning them or getting rid of them despite loads of sincere trying and 'treaties.'
There is no point in working with industry to build safeguards because, China, NorK, Russia, Russia, Russia, France, Germany. I mean, look at all the times we tried to keep precursors out of the hands of the killer arabs and after the war we go in and find out that once again IG Farben has been selling them to the bad guys by the tanker load.
We are stuck with mass surveillance. That genie is out and nobody and no law can put it back in the bottle. The issue now is how to spoof, discredit and fool it. Guess why full AI memes, movies and images are such a thing today? Yeah, it is so when confronted with the visual or/and electronic evidence of your presence in that place at that time you can produce other equally perfectly valid imagery/intelligence that proves that you weren't. Yeah, that will kill the Law as we know it but the Courts just did that all by themselves.
If there was a fully autonomous solution for home defense people living in many places would be interested in buying it. Think how many long simmering neighborhood feuds would be 'cleaned up' the next time the idiot stepped foot on the other guy's property?
As I said in the post, there are things I admire about Anthropic but the one thing we cannot have is for a company to determine what the limits are on power. No, shareholders don't get to vote to turn off FSD or Starlink just because they think the other guy was mean to their sister. That means, by extension, that the critical suppliers we rely on also cannot employ Anthropic as a critical tool in meeting schedule and if they do now, they must discontinue its use as soon as possible.
It's a free country and the only reason it is today is because in the past we limited the role of outsiders in making decisions.
Have you noticed how increasingly delicate and fragile our systems are getting? Tech is not aging at all well and it is accelerating in the wrong direction and entropy is not its friend. I'm not all that concerned about AI. The only part that worries me is when it 'manufactures' evidence that gets used at trial and good people go to jail because they system can no longer tell the truth.......just like all those little kids and liars in the McMartin Preschool case and all the others.
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